How to Raise a Healthy Gamer: Break Bad Screen Habits, End Power Struggles, and Transform Your Relationship with Your Kids

You can’t create a new rule when someone is in violation of it already, plus punish them at the same time.

If you’re afraid, you will likely set too tight a boundary.

You want to use opinion statements and acknowledge that this is just your opinion. If you try to make it a statement of truth, then it becomes an argument.

“I understand that that is your opinion, but did you understand what I was saying?”

Ask them to repeat what they heard you say and what your point is, irrespective of whether they agree or not. This is just about confirming the message that has been communicated, not about whether the message is right or wrong.

You are responsible for your child’s health, and you get to decide if continued contact with someone who challenges that goal is in their best interest.

the time between an action and its consequence determines how strongly the brain reinforces or reduces the behavior.

Accept slow progress. Trust the process.

Rewarding your child for good behavior shouldn’t require you to violate your boundary when it comes to gaming. One way to do that is to give them rewards that don’t have anything to do with games.

your child’s ability to manipulate you and push your buttons comes from your own emotional vulnerability. But they didn’t make you emotionally vulnerable. They just were smart enough to figure out that weakness, then learned how to weaponize it against you.

These games make it easy to focus so your child doesn’t have to train himself to pay attention to the video game; the video game provides so much sensory stimulus that the focus becomes automatic. But the more they outsource their focusing ability to the video game, the worse their attention span will get. The more video games they play, the worse their focus gets, which makes it that much harder to succeed in the real world.

When mammals fall into cold water, their breathing and their heart rate immediately slow down. The brain also shuts off adrenaline production to force the body to relax and have a better chance of surviving.

The whole reason that depression is a clinical illness is that you can feel bad even though nothing is wrong.

When a depressed person stops enjoying life, they have to push themselves to engage with it, which, in turn, leads to exhaustion.

The problem is that, in today’s society, what triggers cortisol are things that staying awake at night won’t help—like paying a mortgage, or being worried about a divorce, or your child’s breakup. This is damaging because dealing with these kinds of things actually require us to get a good night’s sleep, but our brain has evolved to keep us alive by keeping us awake.

the more time your child spends online, the more their social skills atrophy. The worse their social skills get, the harder it is for them to socialize, thus increasing their isolation. The more isolated and anxious they feel, the more they end up gaming.

It’s also important not to push your child into anything, because if you push, they will push back.

the less you think about your problems, the harder they are to solve.

marijuana use in the developing brain makes us more vulnerable to becoming addicted to other things.

“Hey, I’m concerned that you may be using pot. I’d love to talk to you about it, but the conversation is so difficult, I don’t even know where to start. Do you have any ideas how we might be able to talk about it without getting into fights or shutting down communication?”